Halloween: Our Favorite Spooky, Creepy, and Eerie Forests

Earlier this month, the Pokémon Company unleashed one of its weirdest marketing campaigns in recent memory: a twenty-four hour livestream that ostensibly showed off the upcoming Pokémon Sword & Shield. It’s just a single, uninterrupted shot the games’ “Glimwood Tangle” forest, accompanied mostly by nothing more than rustling leaves, running water, and an odd chime. Of course, there’s a little more to it than just being a well produced ASMR video; every so often a then-unknown Pokémon passed the camera by, often just out of place. It’s enjoyably eerie, if not exactly spooky. But it has inspired us to shelve an earlier Halloween list of haunted houses in favor of our favorite spooky forests! These can be woods, jungles, wetlands…really, all it needs is a bunch of leafy natural land and some SPOOKY features! Entries by NOKOLO, AShadowLink, and myself.

Forest of Illusion – Super Mario World

We’re starting off with the least actually spooky entry on this list, but a historically important one. This section of the overworld has false exits and traps that keep you stuck there unless you beat one specific level in the right way. Appropriately, that one’s a forest area set in an ominous nighttime. There was also a Ghost House, though only one, with some nice claustrophobic corridors. The Ghost Houses in general were early forms of the token “spooky” levels that would come up in later platformers, and the greater sound and graphical quality extended to trees, woods, and a general presentation of nature. Oddly enough, though, while forests and spooky levels are commonplace, a fusion of the two hasn’t quite impacted the mainline Mario games. Super Mario Bros. U had the gorgeous and haunted Starry Night-themed Painted Jungle, and the 3D platformers got in on the action with Mario Odyssey’s Deep Woods. But that’s kinda it. However, it’s popular in Mario’s side adventures, such as…

Forever Forest – Paper Mario

Like the Forest of Illusion, Forever Forest screws with your head. Each “room” has four exits and a cute environmental thing you can play with; only one – the one whose effect is unique – moves you forward instead of throwing you back to the beginning. Standard stuff, including the room with an extra secret exit. But what puts this one over the top is how intensely Halloween themed it is. The music is almost comically spooky, trees glow with blood-red eyes, cackling rocks, singing flowers, super strong bees, and this crazy bearded hermit. All it’s missing is a jack-o-lantern with sharp teeth, even if sharp teeth are there, too. All of the Paper Mario games have forests, but only Twilight Trail from The Thousand-Year Door even comes close to season-appropriate spookiness. That you’re rewarded for finishing it with an adorable haunted house adds to that.

The Lost Woods – The Legend of Zelda

Forests are staples of Zelda games, acting as natural mazes, eerie environments, and the prefaces to creepy dungeons like Woodfall Temple or Skull Woods. But the series’ various Lost Woods are great, because they’re the apex of forests that screw with your navigation. The very first Lost Woods back in 1986 required you to move through the same looking area in a specific order, lest you stay trapped. The one from Ocarina of Time was accompanied by a lovely, kind of eerie song. The Twilight Princess version was populated by a creepy puppet-man (and an even eerier version of that same music piece, “Saria’s Song”). But the one from Breath of the Wild probably takes the cake. Like the other versions it’s tricky to navigate, sending you back to the beginning if your lit torch runs out or if you go too far off the path. But it’s also filled with this bioluminescent light and the creepiest music, and the fog makes it feel dreamlike and unknowable. There aren’t many enemies, mostly wolves that make keeping your torch lit hard, but it feels like they could leap out any second. The game also has the pitch black Typhlo Ruins, but that’s almost too intense for the Halloween spirit. It’s entirely devoid of light, so while it’s scary and fun, it lacks that “je ne sais quoi” that makes for the best representation of the season.

Darkroot Garden – Dark Souls

Ooh, now it’s getting really good. While in the same vein as that northern Zelda forest, Darkroot Garden really captures the feeling of being lost in the woods with more greenery – which is appreciated after the greys of the Undead Burg. It’s a creepy, permanently moonlit woods, and it is so fun to be tense and scared inside it. There’s a fake wall that hides a painfully needed bonfire. One boss early on is a giant, glowing butterfly with a spooky music theme. Some of the monsters are gross plant people who freak out and try to stab you with their spiny extremities. There’s even a creepy cat! All of this is tied together with a bit of “class” that’s not quite in the other forests here. The clan of weirdo forest knights have rings that make them look like old timey specters, the towering spires of Lordran add a light Gothic touch to it all, and the garden itself overlooks the picturesque Darkroot Basin, filled with giant crystalline golems and a hydra. The main boss is a fight with a huge, sword-wielding wolf. It feels “respectable,” you know, like a classic Universal horror picture? The later Dark Souls’ Forest of Fallen Giants and Road of Sacrifices are great areas, no doubt about it, but they don’t quite have quite that feel – or the darkness.

Forbidden Woods – Bloodborne

If Darkroot Garden is classic and creepy, and classically creepy, then the Forbidden Woods is a nasty Seventies horror alive with viciousness and viscera. There are tumbleweeds of snakes, people who’s noggins turn into snakes, and snakes that are mostly normal but huge. They feel so distinctly wrong and sickening, which at least signifies that their attacks are poisonous. The other villagers have lethal deathtraps, and there’s a part where one of them shoots a cannon at you? It’s got water galore, especially as you sink down further into the caverns and puddles. The boss fight is even just three punishingly tough baddies in black cloaks, like you’re fighting versions of Death that carried flaming weapons and were kind of obnoxious to fight. The place feels like falling into the primordial discomfort of a massive forest, where everything modern and old are competing to be the worst threat to your health. Which is thematically in keeping with Bloodborne. And also intense. That cannon really does pack a wallop the first time you it blows up a house next to you.

Ilex Forest – Pokémon Gold & Silver

Pokémon can always be relied on for an eerie, picturesque forest. There’s been at least one in every mainline game, plus most of the spinoffs and even the Detective Pikachu movie. They’re fun and a bit ominous, with winding paths and beams of light. Admittedly, they’re never been quite capital-S Scary, but Ilex Forest comes close. It’s the darkest of them, at least in the 1999 original Pokémon Gold & Silver (the remakes from 2009 brightened them up, which makes them look prettier but not ideal for this article). There are no bright spots, just a dark blue that copies the game’s nighttime environments. But it’s not haunted at all. The only mysterious part is a shrine that was the subject of fan speculation for decades before Game Freak staffers revealed that they didn’t even know why they added it. And that’s, honestly, ominous enough on its own. It’s eerie through aesthetics, and that has a value. The hints of red with the flower patterns on the ground help brighten up the swallowing blues, greens, and browns, while still keeping this sense of being on the verge of consumed by these woods. Now, if it only had a haunted mansion like the one in Diamond & Pearl’s Eterna Forest to complete the look. Well, there’s always next year…

Tanetane Island – MOTHER 3, Chosen by Kody “NOKOLO”

The MOTHER series is filled with many locations that are remembered for their designs or their charisma, but then there are those with themes that are just weird. Tanetane Island is home to a forest that isn’t too creepy… that is, until Lucas and friends wash up on the island’s shore, right outside of the forest. Having just been beaten to a pulp and washed away from the sea-dwelling Master Eddy, the gang decides to eat some strange mushrooms so they can restore their strength and make it through the forest alive. What they didn’t know was that these mushrooms would send them on a trip through a forest they’d never forget; instead of forest creatures, all that can be found are Eerie Smile enemies that use the overworld sprites of the party’s friends and family. Each time one is encountered, they’ll speak to your party, too. For example, one that looks like Lucas’ twin brother, Claus, casually says, “Everyone’s waiting for you. Everyone’s waiting to throw rocks at you, spit in your eyes, and make your life hell. Who’s everyone? Everyone you love.” As if Lucas didn’t already have it rough, this creepy place really seems like it’s out to get him. Another enemy with the appearance of his dad, Flint, even tells him, “I’m gonna beat you. Daddy’s gonna beat you, boy.” Thankfully, a hot spring used to refill most of the party’s health can be found in the middle of the forest, so it’s not tough to deal with them… or, at least, the party thinks it’s a hot spring. For some reason, Lucas’ dog, Boney, doesn’t want to get in. After the mushrooms wear off, returning to the hot spring reveals it to be a swampy pile of trash… wow, this game stinks. I guess Boney knows best! Tanetane Island is unforgettably eerie and creepy whether you’re a first time MOTHER player, or a veteran ready to go on another mushroom trip down bad memory lane.

Fairy Forest – Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse, Chosen by AShadowLink

Shin Megami Tensei is built on horror undertones, and it often uses pure dread to fuel the atmosphere of its areas. The Fairy Forest is a bit of an outlier, as it is a sort of safe haven from the demon infested Tokyo. It also serves a very cool narrative purpose, as the follow-up to the best side questline of Shin Megami Tensei IV. The area oozes tranquility with its bright pink leaves and soothing music. It provides a stark contrast from the more grounded areas found elsewhere in the game. As a composer myself, great background music can make an area memorable, and coupled with the beautiful art design. The music paints a more sinister tone, with distorted voices playing chords underneath the track. Similarly, as you get further along in the game, the forest catches aflame and glows a bright blue. The sight is both equally beautiful and haunting, and that really stuck with me, making the Fairy Forest overall the area I remember the most fondly.

Raccoon Forest – Resident Evil

This is honestly kinda not the most fair choice, since you don’t honestly spend that much time in it directly, but the biggest forest of the biggest horror series should be included. The Arklay Mountains’ woodlands are the home of the Spencer Mansion, which is the home of a morally spurious supersoldier laboratory for a pharmaceutical corporation. This means that effectively every animal you encounter (and one plant, and several slugs that are one dude) are either zombified or a horrific monster. An underrated quality of the first game and its remake is capturing why their main characters wouldn’t just head for the hills, because we know that the zombie dogs and birds are the ones that managed to get in. Resident Evil’s qualities mean the games mostly take place inside, or in settlements, but the wilderness is always out there. As bad as the towns or cities or backwoods villages are, the bad stuff never just stays there.

Greenvale, Deadly Premonition

And while we’re on the subject of woods mostly around the actual game, we’ve gotta talk about the town of Greenvale. Deadly Premonition is a “Twin Peaks game,” and Twin Peaks games have to have forests as a spooky, primordial space in which the normalcy and niceties of man give way to base desires, terrors, and fears. And so, Greenvale is a decaying American town – a logging one, natch – surrounded by a forest that’s almost threatening to consume it. The game uses a lot of tree imagery, but not as a metaphor for nature; it represents more often than not that destructive potential of man. The game’s multiple dream sequences take place in a wooded clearing, and there’s a running narrative about the relationship of the town’s main resource and its slow decay and downturn. More directly, the game’s first “level” is a crazy maze in the middle of a forest that introduces you to the gross, gross shadow enemies. It’s super claustrophobic and kinda janky, and while it’s probably turned a lot of players off it’s still neat. Even if it’s not the best first impression, it’s still valuable – especially for the moment when our intrepid Francis York Morgan mercifully escapes to the town’s main road.

Almost every good part of Alan Wake

So Alan Wake is really…mixed. There’s amazing lighting and atmosphere and that same kind of Twin Peaks-iness that we’re always hankering for on this site. But it’s meshed with poor writing and gameplay that never goes past a very samey baseline. On the plus side, those samey scary gunplay sequences are pretty cool at their best! The guy with the name on the box is vacationing in a Stephen King-style town whose residents – or maybe they’re… not even people! – march through the forests at night in search of intruders to murder. This leads to long gameplay sessions of Alan futzing through the woods, trying to find batteries for a super inefficient flashlight. The shadowy people show up, and he uses his light and gun to take them down. The whole sensation is great at the moments it clicks, especially when the chapters end and licensed music plays. I can’t call Alan Wake a great game, but it nails the feeling of being lost in the spooky woods – and why that can be fun.

Of course, these are the ideas we came up with. We’ve not yet gotten a chance to play Blair Witch, for instance, and there are a few options we didn’t come up with. So if you’ve got a favorite, mention it in the comments!